


It's In The Blood

by pettiot



Category: Final Fantasy XII
Genre: vampire
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2010-08-04
Updated: 2010-08-04
Packaged: 2021-02-27 11:13:34
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,947
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22416064
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/pettiot/pseuds/pettiot
Summary: 'Basch fon Ronsenburg, you died.  Everyone saw your execution, Archadia publicized it, Ondore sanctioned it; what did they do to you?'
Kudos: 2





	It's In The Blood

  


Basch learned, long ago: that which had once been of his blood came only to taunt. Thus he slept through his brother's insults and felt but the lingering sear of verbosity on his skin when he woke.

And he woke, again, each time, and each time he did not want to wake.

Three faces look down at him, framed by the high lip of the coffin. The sunlight still sears, diffuse and despairing this deep in a dungeon, but Basch opens his eyes regardless of the pain. He needs to see.

Noah was not one of the three.

.

'What did they do to you?' Balthier asks, again and again, phrasing it a little differently each time. 'Basch fon Ronsenburg, you died. Everyone saw your execution, Archadia publicized it, Ondore sanctioned it; what did they do to you?'

Basch does not know what they did to him. He hurts, every time he moves his flesh hurts; every time he thinks to remember his heart hurts. Betrayal after betrayal, his own flesh betraying him, his own blood rebelling; every thing and thought hurts. But he is strong. Balthier, Vaan, Fran, they all stand back when the dead rise to attack them; Basch is strong enough to bear the weight of the world. His wrists are thinner than Balthier's, his shoulders twisted further than Vaan's, his waist scarce three parts of Fran's narrowest point, but whatever they did to him, Basch is _strong_.

'Who did this to you,' Balthier asks, eyes dark and glittering and so intent, this deep in a dungeon. His voice is a whisper, hoarse and demanding. 'Basch fon Ronsenburg, you died, and someone resurrected you. _Who did this to you_?'

Basch knows the answer to that, sees it in Balthier's cheekbones and long nose and awkward height; he cannot answer. _Your father_ , Basch would have to say. _Your father did this to me, your father, and my brother, and gods what a twisted tangle the Fates weave._

Vaan's suspicion is the strongest, heard in the beat of his heart, quicker each time Basch approaches. Fran's wariness is native, and never changes. Balthier – offers only curiosity in the scent of his blood, and some taint within that, too much like his father for Basch's own comfort. Curiosity does not kill the Bunansa cat, oh no; curiosity is Bunansa bread and butter.

The first stroke of daylight hits them at the Barheim's exit: Balthier breathes his freedom deep; Vaan inhales his country's dust; Fran scents the horizon, hunting; Basch screams.

'Why did they do this to you?' Balthier asks, with fingers dripping poison for potion is pure pain to Basch; the pirate soothes sunburn with a touch that sears, but after at least there is relief. 'Torture?' Balthier's voice drops into darkness; he suspects he knows, Basch thinks, Bunansa curiosity curdling about the thought. 'Insanity?'

_Both_ , Basch could answer. To see the extent of what makes a man, to know; to create something out of death that cannot fear death; he wonders if Draklor used him as a prototype, and there will be more of him in the future, marching in the dark of night, hidden by the light of day, to devour cities with deathless desperation, with indestructible strength and no need to feed; an immortal, invincible army that needs no payment beyond what they can take from the corpses they create. That could be why they did this to him; Basch hopes so, because otherwise everything he suffered was just for a depraved Doctor's dark little desires.

They wait for a day, and the blisters on Basch's skin heal. Balthier rinses poison from his fingers with esuna balm, checks his guns, tallies their stocks; Vaan scowls at the horizon and at Basch and his heartbeat, youth, his blood _tests_ Basch's temper; Fran likewise tests the tension of her bowstring, striking, stringing, striking, to set Basch on edge with the sound.

Night comes.

Night always comes. There is no coffin here to keep Basch dead, down, to keep him safe. Three pulses fill the night, to draw him; predator instinct has him target the pulse most fervent with life.

Balthier pulls him off Vaan, wrestles him down; Fran holds Basch's wrists high above his head and kneels with full weight as Balthier tries to pin that heaving chest to the silvered sands; and Basch howls, bloody-lipped, and revolted, and Balthier cries:

'What are you?'

Basch does not answer. In the fit of that bloodlust, he cannot remember his name.

.

Basch has sanity through the day. They blind him to keep the sunlight from his eyes, cast a great cloud of poison about him that every breath of daylight comes tainted with a murk that keeps him moving; the shadow of thick green keeps the light from penetrating too deep, and he survives.

They move as swiftly as they can, until the shade of the desert's rock lets Basch exist without daylight destruction. Fran cooks a wolf they shot, and there are bowls full of its blood, waiting. Basch gags when he looks at that thick red, hungers for it, hates himself for the hunger; but this hatred, unlike his state of being, is not unusual. Vaan's neck is whole thanks to Balthier's potions, but the boy is pale, staggering; Fran gives him the dead wolf's liver instead of a steak.

The afternoon dies. Sunset. Dusk. They bind him, stake him down, spell Vaan to Sleep when the boy begins to panic. Balthier watches. Fran watches. Basch weeps. What did they do him, but exactly what he deserves? Treacherous flesh; treachery in flesh; he is not a traitor, but has been re-made exactly so; no good deed goes unpunished.

The wolf's thick cold blood is not enough. Vaan is far distant. Balthier's heart beats with vitality, a pace like a running man; Fran's heart beats slow and so strongly, steady, the heart of a tree; Balthier has to fire, seven, eight, ten bullets Basch counts ripping through him, and then comes the strike of Fran's spear through his gut, and it would be a mercy if he could die but Draklor is not known for mercy.

Dawn returns sanity, and Balthier's eyes are ringed by shadow, his brow scored with the lines of an old man. 'Basch,' he says, and sounds so much like his father. 'Basch, I'm so sorry.'

.

Night's terror approaches, again; Vaan is spelled to sleep, and silence; Basch asks, again and again, _why haven't you bound me? Balthier, you must bind me, Balthier, please, Balthier, bind me, bind me--_

'It's not enough,' Balthier says, aching, 'the rope's not enough, Basch, and I don't know how much damage you can take before we'd kill you. I don't want to kill you. What they did to you was wrong…what Vayne did, what your brother did, and I cannot speak for the extent of wrongness of what my _father_ did to you. I cannot hurt you any more, not even to preserve our own skin.'

'I will kill you,' Basch says, states: he will. 'When night comes, there is only the hunger.'

'But if you are sated?' Balthier asks, swift, and raises a hand to forestall argument. 'I know my father, he would not have created a creature of chaos. There are laws that govern your existence, laws that bind your soul to your flesh. We must learn your laws, Basch, to use against him. And until then, I must offer what recompense I can that all of us can survive.'

_No_ , Basch wants to say. _Don't do this_.

'I fled,' Balthier admits, 'I ran away from what I saw my father becoming, from what he turned Draklor into, a playground for his pet ideas to run rampant. Perhaps I could have done little to divert him, had I stayed. Recriminations are worthless now. I will do what I can to divert his intent, now, where I am free to act as I can.' A shrug, a roll of shoulders, squared off with intent; Basch watches, too captivated, as Balthier unlaces his high collar with too-quick fingers, with jerking motion. 'Call this recompense.'

'You have done nothing to have to offer this,' Basch tries, 'your father's sins are not your own.'

'And for you, who committed no sin but have been made that you cannot help but murder? If you will not call this recompense, call it assurance. I will not let you kill Vaan or any other innocent.'

'Yet you are innocent—'

Balthier and Fran laugh, together. Silence falls again too swiftly. The pulse at Balthier's throat flickers, clear, captivating. Basch's protestation dies.

'It's almost dusk,' Balthier says, as though Basch does not feel it in the ebb and flow within his own thick blood. Balthier tilts his chin, up and away. His neck is long, thin, corded. 'Please, Basch. I will not kill you for your nature; repay me with the same favor.'

The burr of Balthier's pain catches in his throat, vibrating. Basch feels it against his own cheek when he bends, he bites, he finds. Balthier does not cry out, as Vaan did, but there is the flex of muscle, the resistance, the clench of jaw. Fingers knot and release in sand, both of theirs, in unison. Basch feels it when Balthier starts to go slack, the sudden release of blood, flooding his mouth, sliding down his throat; he sucks and swallows, sucks and swallows, and he could drink the world dry of such warmth, intense—

Fran pries him away with claws and force, with words, with his name, said over and again, repeatedly, with the sound of Balthier's half-surrendered groan; and Basch remembers, yes, yes, he is _Basch_ , not Draklor's beast, and he has taken his fill of Bunansa blood.

Balthier sprawls, fingers, elbows, heels in the sand, lids fluttering, dark with blue blood. 'Fran,' he says, soft, striving to stand before he falls; again and again, he falls.

'It is dusk,' Fran says. She releases Basch to bend to Balthier's side.

'It is past dusk,' Basch acknowledges.

'And you do not hunt.'

'I am sated. And thus sane. So it seems.'

'Tonight,' Fran says, as Balthier curls slowly in the sand, 'I will watch you.'

'Thank you,' Basch says, to both of them.

.

'And so,' Balthier says on the morrow, still slurred, 'we have our means of control.'

'You cannot bleed for the world,' Basch tells him.

'I can bleed for long enough; we hunt my father now, Basch. But first, to Rabanastre.'

'To Rabanastre,' Basch says. 'I have friends there.'

'You had friends there,' Fran says. 'You have changed; do you imagine they have not?'

Basch bows his head. She is right.

'Enough,' Balthier says. 'Each hurdle when we come to it; solutions come in the form of opportunities; we must use what weapons we have.'

'Is that what I am now?' Basch asks. 'A weapon against your father?'

'Do you wish to be directed elsewhere, Basch fon Ronsenburg?'

It would be a lie to say otherwise; he hungers for Bunansa blood, shed on stone or sand irrespective. And not Balthier's blood, no, however that is a sacrifice made necessary. Basch is…satisfied, however unwilling the feeling.

'To Rabanastre,' Balthier says, again. The sun does not scar now; Basch is full of life and light; the pirate is a sky-born son with the horizon held in the tang of his blood's salt. Basch barely squints as dawn spills through the rock, seeking.

Not a trace of the bite shows on the column of Balthier's neck, punctures healed to disappearance. Still, Basch cannot look away as Balthier laces his collar tight, and high enough to sit just under his chin.

.

  



End file.
